Android XR chief on the moment he realized — 'Things have changed. This is very different. This is very new. It's very powerful.'

A revolution in wearable technology is now on the horizon. Soon we'll see a legion of smart glasses that combine on-demand and on-need AI-backed audio and visual information, delivered with or without your nearby smartphone, and all without the imposition of oddball looks or physical discomfort. However, the revolution is yet to be built on "aha!" moments (and maybe some FOMO).

That's the conclusion I drew after speaking with Juston Payne, Google's Senior Director of Product Management for XR. We were chatting moments after I had my own "aha!" moments with dev-kit-level monocular and dual-screen Android XR smart glasses. You can read more about that impressive first look here.

What convinced me (and clearly Payne) that this is the next big thing was a personal experience he had in Italy. As Payne explained it, his family was on a trip in Rome, and "I put the glasses that you were just trying [the dual-screen Android XR prototype smart glasses) onto my 10-year-old, Clark. We put them on, and we asked him where he wanted to go. So he asked the glasses [Gemini] to take him to a gelato shop." Payne, agreed that, considering the heat, it was a solid choice.

"And then the glasses showed him where to go," explained Payne, who was describing the monocular and dual-screen XR glasses' ability to project a Google map, and turn-by-turn navigation, and even show you the direction based on your position right before your eyes.

"So then my wife, daughter, and I followed Clark through the sort of winding streets of Rome to get to a gelato shop. As if he lived there. As if he was a local.

"That for me was this moment of just feeling like, 'Oh wow, things have changed.' Like, this is very different. This is very new. It's very powerful. So it's like that sort of evolution that we're really excited about bringing in."

Getting to the tipping point

There is, though, still quite a distance to travel from the Payne Family's "aha!" moment to true Fear of Missing Out ("FOMO"), that moment when the Android XR smartglasses' availability and ubiquity generate FOMO among other consumers and drive adoption.

Google and Android XR partner Samsung has already announced partnerships with eyewear makers Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. I pointed out, though, that most people are probably still getting their eyewear from places like LensCrafters and Visionworks. Payne pointed out the partnership announcement with Kering Eyewear, but that's still a luxury eyewear provider.

Payne acknowledged that the vision is far broader availability.

"So the idea is that over time, we want to get to the vision that you said – which is that anybody can walk into a store and make a choice to get a smart version, which is powered by Android XR and Gemini. And that'll be a really exciting future to get to."

The key, he told me, is ensuring the industry delivers the right form factors, and especially the price points. The lens options, he added, should be "inclusive of people's different vision needs."

A big moment for Android XR

Payne and I spoke as Google and its partners were preparing to kick off an Android Day: XR Edition (Dec. 8), the moment when everyone would see its vision for Android XR-powered smart glasses.

The glasses, while not entirely ready for primetime, are the clearest indication of Android's plans and full-blown aspirations for Android XR, which Payne reminds me is "the next computing platform. So, it's a major new category that will come into existence over the coming years, and it's going to be a major part of people's lives going forward."

The single and dual display glasses, along with the Xreal Aura (revealed at the same event) and Samsung Galaxy XR mixed reality headset I recently reviewed, now represent the full spectrum of Google's current Android XR ambitions.

While all of them are built on a foundation of Gemini intelligence, there are differences that I experienced in my hands-on demos. I was curious if Google is dictating, for instance, the display style, which ranges from the Sony Micro OLED screens and prisms found on the Xreal Aura (which actually tethers to a pocketable compute pack) to the high-resolution wide FoV of the Galaxy XR, and then to the thin and and transparent waveguide technology found in the two self-contained Android XR prototype smart glasses.

Turns out that while Google isn't dictating the display experiences, it is "opinionated" on this topic. There are, Payne explained, reasons for all these differences.

"It's actually useful to think here in terms of the type of usage that we expect from the products, and then we work with the partner companies on the right solutions in there," he said.

Use cases define displays

Products used "episodically", like the Aura or the Galaxy XR, want optical systems that prioritize a wide field of view. For these products, partial or even full occlusion of your real-world field of view is okay because you're often sitting down and, say, playing a game or watching a video.

Obviously, the requirements are different for glasses where you can't afford for the lenses to be off or occluded in any significant way. "For those, you do need a fully clear lens. Like a beautiful, crystal clear lens where you have a display that's built directly into the lens. Those will be waveguide solutions."

Not only is the Android XR idea not "one size fits all", Payne envisions a future where people own more than one XR device. "We actually think that the same person will likely have multiple XR products in their lives. Sort of in much the same way that somebody doesn't have a laptop or a phone; they have a laptop and a phone."

Of course, that means even lighter and thinner glasses and, in general, cheaper and more easily accessible smart frames, and there will be an ecosystem and apps to support the smart glasses. Payne is excited about the future and sees a parallel to at least one other tech epoch.

"We think that this is actually a very early space, and the history is not yet written for it. So it's great to see that there's momentum, it's great to see that there's some traction out there. But, you know, contextualizing it: there's no glasses out there that have an app ecosystem attached to them yet. So in that way, it's almost like the iPhone launch, and there was no App Store; there was like that little period of time. We're still in that era."

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